In a mystery that would make Frank Lloyd Wright roll over in his rural Spring Green grave — which he can’t do because he’s not there, having been buried and dug up twice — a new grave marker for his murdered mistress appeared in the family cemetery one day last month.

And then, another mystery: The marker disappeared before anyone could find how it got there in the first place.

The mystery was partly solved last week. The culprit was a Wright disciple, 76-year-old architect John Ottenheimer, who arrived in Spring Green on May 11 carrying a piece of red granite memorializing Mamah Borthwick.

His self-assigned task was to put that stone, a grave marker bearing the name of Wright’s mistress and muse, in the private cemetery at Taliesin’s Unity Chapel outside Spring Green.

Ottenheimer was a key member of the Fellowship, a group of young architecture students who worshipped and worked under Wright in the 1950s, and had a desk adjacent to the master’s at Taliesin.

Ottenheimer was at Taliesin for three days in May. On one of the days he went to the cemetery at Unity Chapel, the Lloyd-Jones family cemetery since 1886. He dug a hole near Wright’s grave site and carefully positioned the heavy red granite stone, on which was sandblasted: MAMAH BORTHWICK 1869-1914.

Then he left without telling anyone what he had done, an act of reticence that fits the topic: In his 17 years at Taliesin, 1953-1970, not once did he hear anyone utter the name of Borthwick, considered by some researchers to be the great love of the oft-entangled Wright’s life.

Borthwick was the wife of a wealthy Chicago client of Wright’s, who scandalously ran off to Europe with the architect in 1909, leaving her two children and husband while he left his six children and wife.

They later returned to Spring Green to what the newspapers referred to as their “love bungalow,” Taliesin, where they lived in sin and scorn — though Wright spent his working time in Chicago — until 1914.

That year, Borthwick and her two children and four others were murdered by an ax-wielding servant who also burned the bungalow to the ground.

Tracked down by the Wisconsin State Journal last week, Ottenheimer was at first sly about the new stone, admitting only to knowing about an old stone, a small marker of uncertain vintage that memorializes “MAMAH BORTHWICK CHENEY.” Only when a critical comment was made about the lettering design of the new stone did Ottenheimer interrupt to say it was he who designed and placed the new one.

And he was shocked to hear that it already has been removed, sometime in the first weekend in June.
Taliesin officials, who are busy with restoration projects considerable distances from the cemetery and chapel, were not aware the new stone was there or had been taken.

Wright, who died in 1959, has a stylish grave marker — designed by Ottenheimer — in the cemetery, but his body is not there. It was taken to Taliesin West in Arizona after the death of Wright’s third wife, Olgivanna, in 1985. Cremated at her command, the ashes of the two were joined and sealed in a monument there.

Ottenheimer said he was inspired to place a stone with Borthwick’s true name after reading Nancy Horan’s novel, “Loving Frank,” and, by coincidence, meeting the author, who had moved to Washington state, near where Ottenheimer lives.
Who took the grave marker?

Borthwick “was an inspiration to Mr. Wright, made him go in a different direction, to go further and wider with the ideas he had,” and there was no stone for her in the cemetery where she is buried, said Ottenheimer, who said he never noticed the tiny stone placed beneath the pine tree planted at her burial.

“I got to thinking about it, and said well, I was the designated ‘grave marker person’ at Taliesin for years, and this is one of those things and if I don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it. So I designed the stone, had it made here in Seattle and I took it” to Taliesin.

He had thought about asking permission to place the stone, “but nobody was there.

“I was hoping for some help in digging the hole, but there wasn’t anybody around so I just put it in and, if somebody wants, it could always be moved,” he said.

Told that the marker already had been taken, Ottenheimer said he was “shocked” and he would like it returned to the cemetery.

“It belongs to me, I paid for it, it’s my stone,” he said.

But it’s not his cemetery.

On Wednesday, Lloyd Natof, Wright’s great-grandson, admitted he had taken the new marker.

Natof, who lives in Chicago, is the president of the board in charge of the little Lloyd-Jones family cemetery and Unity Chapel. When he discovered someone had placed the grave marker there without permission, he took it.

The problem is that Ottenheimer placed the grave marker in a place that already may be reserved for another family, Natof said.

“It is a private cemetery, and family members determine what goes on there, so my concern was of a larger, family issue, Natof said. The cemetery board will meet this summer to look for a solution, he said.

Borthwick’s family has never approached the cemetery for any further markers, he said, and whatever they would want to do is fine with him. Only recently, since the books of the past few years, has Borthwick “been positioned as a character of importance in people’s imaginations,” Natof said.

There is scant information available on the old marker in the graveyard, except that it was long after the murders that Borthwick’s grave was marked.

Author Brendan Gill, in his book on Wright, “Many Masks,” quotes Wright about not having a monument on Borthwick’s grave: “All I had left to show for the struggle for freedom of the five years past that had swept most of my former life away had now been swept away. Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?”